


Pockets

by Bekkoni



Series: The Platonic Adventures of Bruce and Lois [2]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Justice League, Justice League & Justice League Unlimited (Cartoons), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff, Gen, Hurt Bruce, Male-Female Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 17:50:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1558889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bekkoni/pseuds/Bekkoni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lois doesn't appreciate her husband bringing home stray vigilantes, especially of the cranky Gothamite variety.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pockets

Lois had spent all day cleaning up, making dinner, and removing or silencing any devices in the apartment that could distract her superhero husband (sure, he wouldn’t like it that she’d hidden his comlink, but he’d forgive it after tonight). She didn’t play the housewife-y, seduce-the-husband role very often, but she’d recently blown a political scandal wide open for the Planet’s front page, and felt like celebrating. Hell, she’d even broken into her treats fund and bought a couple of fine steaks and a pricey bottle of wine.

So now she was standing by the table, in a fancy wedding-present nightgown that was far too sheer and short to sleep in, and waiting for Clark to come home. According to Diana, he was on a mission somewhere in Chicago, undercover. She had promised he would be home by eight.

The door opened and Lois perked up, only to see a very muddy, sooty Clark carry in an equally dirty (and way more unconscious) Bruce and lay him on the couch. “Lois. Hi. Sorry I’m late—Bruce and I were in Chicago, and we just about caught the guy, but then there was this explosion—and Bruce is hurt and I didn’t just want to leave him alone—Alfred’s not home—so he’s spending the night, okay?”

“Clark.” Because Lois was a woman of infinite patience, she did not immediately find a piece of kryptonite to murder her husband with. But she couldn’t keep a murderous tone out of her voice. “Clark, maybe you could have called me beforehand?”

Clark looked up, saw her in her negligee with candles on the table, and said, “Oh.”

“ _Oh?!_ ” Lois snapped.

“Sorry.” Clark looked reasonably abashed. “I didn’t realize you wanted to do something special tonight. We could still have dinner.”

Lois went into the closet and grabbed her bathrobe, because she didn’t want to be nearly-naked in front of Bruce, even if he was currently passed out. “I can’t exactly seduce you on the table with fucking _Bruce_ sleeping on the couch, Clark.”

Clark turned sixteen shades of red, and mumbled “sorry” again. Lois noted that he also looked pretty regretful now, and decided that that was good enough.

“All right,” she said, tightening the belt of her robe. She looked Bruce over; he hadn’t stirred. “What did he do to himself?”

“Cracked ribs,” Clark said. “Four of them. Concussion, obviously. And a fractured cheekbone—he’ll have a nasty black eye in the morning.”

Lois sighed again and admitted to herself that Bruce really did look quite pathetic right now. She reached down and gently tugged off his jacket, which was currently the dirtiest thing he was wearing. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let the two of you mess up my apartment. Go take a shower, Clark, and I’ll throw this in the wash.”

Then, she hefted the jacket and realized it weighed as much as a small child. “Jesus! What is Bruce keeping in here? Lead weights?”

Clark squinted the way he did when he was using his x-ray vision. “The pockets are lead-lined, at least. I have no idea what’s in there.”

Lois, for just a second, wished she could have a normal life like a normal person. “Okay. I’ll deal with it. Seriously though—shower, now.”

Clark nodded and jumped to the bathroom at superspeed to avoid getting dirt on anything else, and Lois heard the water running by the time she’d gotten to the washer.

She laid Bruce’s jacket open on the washer and beheld the sight of what must have been a dozen different pockets meticulously sewn into the lining. _Poor Alfred must be working himself to the bone_ , she thought, _that or Bruce has a child labor sweatshop in the Batcave_. Well, given the number of Robins he had on hand, that second one wasn't so unlikely. She could feel armor plates sewn beneath it, but that couldn’t be what all the weight was from.

She opened up the first pocket and nearly sliced her hand open on a stack of batarangs. As it was, she avoided stitches but still got a couple of nice, long cuts across her fingertips. She sucked at the blood and carefully tossed the weapons into the laundry sink. One of them hit the faucet and left a nasty gouge.

Damn it. She was going to have to bill Bruce for damages, like she had when he’d blown out the window at Clark’s bachelor party (she still hadn’t been able to drag out from either of them what, exactly, had happened). She unzipped the next pocket and found packs of pills and bandages, which she carefully put aside.

The third pocket held a bunch of unmarked capsules that she removed very, very, very carefully because she wanted neither tear gas nor knockout gas in her house. Frankly, she wasn’t even sure that whatever was in the capsules was as harmless as those two things. Considering that Bruce had once frozen a river with a nitrogen bomb, she didn’t trust him to have _normal_ weapons.

Most of the other pockets were empty, or held little gadgets that she could guess the purpose of—a phone, a tiny computer, a couple of different devices meant to test blood-alcohol level or screen for toxins or analyze evidence. She was almost ready to toss the jacket into the washer when she felt something like a slip of paper in the last pocket, the one she had glanced at but  not opened because it had looked empty.

She unzipped it and pulled out a photo folded in half. For a second, she debated if she should open it or not, but she _was_ a nosy reporter and since she was laundering Bruce’s clothes instead of having a nice dinner with Clark, she figured that Bruce had given up some of his rights to privacy paranoia. So she opened up the picture and saw a scene from the League’s Christmas party two years ago.

Clark had wanted a picture of all of them in civvies, and of course Bruce had vehemently protested (A stupidly sentimental idea that could compromise all of our identities should anyone lose a copy, he had said).  But in the end Clark had managed to corral all of them (plus Lois herself, because Diana had pulled her over) in front of a camera. The final picture had most of them smiling, Wally out of place because he couldn’t stand still, Clark with one arm around Lois and the other hand subtly gripping Bruce’s arm to keep him from darting away, and Bruce himself with his face half-turned from the camera. The camera had gone off before he could totally escape it though, and so it caught him in a rare moment of not glaring at anyone.

It was actually, Lois thought, a very nice picture in the fact that it caught them all in their essence. She still wouldn’t have thought Bruce the type to carry it around, especially after he’d gone that rant before the photo was taken about how dangerous it would be to have it exist.

On the couch, she heard Bruce muttering dark, incomprehensible things in his sleep. She sighed, and looked over at him. For all the airs the guy put on, he couldn’t really fool her. Not when he let Ma Kent call him sweetie—although Ma Kent usually got her way, as Lois had learned—and carried around pictures of his surrogate family. Despite herself, Lois couldn’t really be all that upset at him. Maybe this was how Alfred kept from strangling his ward.

Lois heard the shower turn off and Clark open the bathroom door, and in a split second decision she slipped the photo into the pocket of her bathrobe. Clark appeared behind her, and reached around to kiss her on the cheek. “Hey. Nothing in his jacket exploded, did it?”

“Not yet.” She pointed to the mystery capsules. “Those still might. I don’t know what’s in them, so _you’re_ moving them, Mr. Invulnerable.”

Clark scanned them and then swept them off the dryer along with the rest of Bruce’s toys. “Tear gas, dispersible antitoxins, mild nerve gas…nothing fatal.”  

“Nothing fatal and nothing I want to deal with,” she said, and returned the kiss. “If you make me explain to carpet cleaners why our nice rugs are covered in fear toxin antidote, things will not end happily.”

Clark smiled and took care of all of the little gadgets and weapons, and Lois decided that this night might be salvageable after all.

 

****#****

 

Clark was gone to an interview with a corporate whistleblower and Lois was at the stove making breakfast by the time Bruce woke up. She was standing by the stove whisking pancake batter when she heard the couch springs creak and turned around.

Bruce sat up in a flash, hissing with the pain of broken ribs.

“Hey,” Lois said, and he jumped.

“Hi,” he replied carefully, while at the same time examining everything like he wasn’t quite sure where he was or if he should be talking to her instead of punching something.

“You want some breakfast?” she asked, and then after he realized his clothing was missing added, “Your jacket is in the dryer. I wasn’t going to let that thing on my furniture.”

Bruce eased himself off the couch and came up to lean on the counter and watch what she was doing. It occurred to her that he was still fuzzy from the concussion and just hiding it well. He was black and blue down the right side of his face—Clark had been right about the bruising. Lois did not fancy herself a very touchy-feely person, but she still winced in sympathy and fished an icepack out of the freezer. “Here. You look like hell.”

“Thanks,” he muttered, actually sincere, and held the ice against his black eye.

“You want some aspirin? Or something stronger?”

He considered it, and then decided to be a tough guy. “I’m fine.”

“Right-o. That’s why you can’t stand up straight.” She pointed out his arms, now not hidden under a jacket, and marked up and down with cuts and bruises both old and new. “Seriously, do yourself a favor. Nobody’s going to think you’re any less macho for an aspirin.” When he didn’t say anything, she tried out Ma Kent’s strategy for getting him to do something. “Come on. Sweetie.”

That got her a glare. “You are _not_ Clark’s mom.”

“You’re right.” She picked up the medicine bottle and chucked it at his face so quickly that he was forced to catch it. “If I were Ma Kent, you'd be obeying me. Take a damn pill. Want blueberries in your pancakes?”

Bruce tossed her a look but did what she said. Lois suspected he was just too tired to fight about it. So she pulled out the picture and handed it over to him. “I found this in your pocket. Very cute, keeping it around.”

“I can’t just leave it lying around,” he said, without meeting her eyes. “And it was for our undercover story.”

“You’re full of crap,” Lois said.

Bruce’s head snapped up.

“You could’ve burned the picture if you really didn’t want it. You like carrying it around.” Lois stirred in the blueberries calmly, just letting him squirm.

Bruce looked down away from her eyes and stuck the photo deep into his pants pocket, proving her point. He almost said something, then paused and started again. “Ah—you didn’t tell Clark, right?" 

“No, your cold and heartless reputation is intact.” She saw him relax and couldn’t resist another jab. “At least the little bit of it you have left. I think they know you well enough by now.”

Bruce huffed but apparently didn’t have the energy to argue with her anymore, so she let him go and poured pancakes into the pan. “You don’t have to be so ashamed, Bruce. It’s my job to call you on this stuff, you know. Clark is too nice to do it.”

Bruce shrugged and picked out a pancake from the pan.

“You can eat with a plate and fork, you know.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Now you’ve decided to be nice to me?" 

“Temporary reprieve.” He chuckled at that. Lois decided that was as good a time as any to pile up the rest of the pancakes and take a few for herself. While she stood next to Bruce and had breakfast, she gazed over at the pantry and saw a box of spaghetti. It wasn’t steak, but maybe she and Clark could have their nice night after all.

 


End file.
